


Paperwork

by cobweb_diamond



Series: Paperwork [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-22
Updated: 2012-03-22
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:04:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobweb_diamond/pseuds/cobweb_diamond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Plotless ficlet, written purely to satisfy my own headcanon that Phil Coulson is a field agent rather than a paper-pusher, and delegates as much of his paperwork as humanly possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paperwork

It takes a few weeks for Clint to realise that no one else on the team -- with the possible exception of Natasha -- knows what Coulson does all day. At all. As in, Tony gives every impression of thinking that Phil is General Fury's secretary. 

To be fair, no one really seems to know what the Avengers are supposed to be doing, either. The whole Loki situation had been a BFD but after that? Well, there are a hell of a lot of press-conferences and not a lot of action.They end up being sent out on a lot of SHIELD's bigger clean-up jobs, is all. Today's is a non-tentacly (but still creepy as hell) alien menace that appears for as-yet unknown reasons in the subway tunnel between 96th and 103rd. Clint gets to spend all of four minutes cracking Men In Black jokes before he’s taken out by falling masonry. Not his finest hour, but hey, in Clint's book any day that ends with all his limbs still technically intact still counts as a good one.

He gets back from the SHIELD hospital a couple of hours later than the others, wearing a borrowed shirt over the bandages. Despite the fact that all good boys and girls should be in bed by now, Tony and Steve are sitting at the kitchen table, filling out paperwork.

‘Uh,’ says Clint, pouring himself some orange juice (no beer on top of pain meds, even though he didn’t need the hardcore ones this time round). ‘Did we get some homework I don’t know about?’ Usually they're all sent copies of Avengers interviews before they're published, but Clint rarely bothers reading them over because nothing he says is ever going to overshadow Tony Stark: Billionaire Playboy Public-Relations Disaster. 

‘Reports, duh,’ says Tony, twirling his pen, dropping it, and then sticking it behind his ear.

‘I’m sure you’ll be allowed to postpone yours for a while,’ says Steve encouragingly. ‘How’s the arm?’

‘Hey, you know, mostly taped together now. I'll be back on the range by Friday.’ He peers over Steve’s shoulder, trying to read Steve’s looping 1940s cursive. He's filling out a hard-copy printout of the incident reports SHIELD agents have to file after they come into contact with a possible extraterrestrial presence. ‘Who gave you these?’

Tony frowns into his empty coffee cup. ‘Coulson, like always. I swear it’s personal. I tried to get one of my PAs to forge the first few but he saw through it at once. He’s got some kind of freaky lie-detector superpower, like a grade school principal or The Mentalist.’

‘O...kay,’ says Clint. ‘What I’m going to take away from this conversation is that you watch The Mentalist.’

He grabs a cupcake from one of the cupboards and heads upstairs to his room, suppressing a grin. Flopping back on his bed, he thumbs through his contacts list and tries to ignore the fact that there’s half an inch of bandages engulfing his left forearm. The doctor who'd patched him up had told him to relax, and since Clint's main recreational activity of shooting holes in things is out he'll have to settle for the next best option: Phil Coulson. 

Usually Coulson answers his phone with a terse, “Coulson” but 11.30pm is hardly office hours, even for him. Clint has to wait for a whole three-and-a-half rings before Coulson picks up.

‘Please tell me you haven’t managed to get yourself into another fight, Barton. I have a breakfast meeting tomorrow, and I’d prefer to have more than three hours of sleep before I go to it.’

‘Nah, just calling to hear your voice,’ he says, because there's precisely zero chance of Coulson actually believing it. ‘But I do have a question. Are you making Tony Stark fill out mission reports longhand?’

‘No one’s _making_ him do anything,’ says Coulson, in a certain Coulson-specific non-smirk way that lets Clint know that yeah, he’s totally right about this one.

‘So he just volunteered to do pointless write-ups when you have a pool of thirty desk agents ready to take dictation while he’s in the jacuzzi?’

‘I find that the less Tony Stark knows about the inner workings of SHIELD, the easier it is to control him.’

He rolls his eyes at his bedroom ceiling. ‘This is revenge for him calling you a paper-pusher, isn’t it?’

Clint is _sure_ that Coulson is smiling. ‘I’m teaching him about the dangers of self-fulfilling prophecies.’

‘And Steve?’ Because Coulson may be kind of bitchy in his own weird way, but he’s not _mean_.

‘Captain Rogers appreciates routine. And writing things down helps him with the debriefings.’

Clint grins. Phil Coulson: looking out for everyone, even when they don’t want it. Dispensing life lessons and therapy all in one easily-xeroxed package. ‘You know how Tony likes to call you Supernanny...?’

‘Goodnight, Barton,’ says Coulson firmly, and hangs up.


End file.
